Like many of us who are reading this post, I spend a lot of time on my phone. And like many, I know and accept the guilt of being one of those many who waste too much time on the phone.
50 years ago, the first mobile phone was invented. Since then, these devices have become so useful in our daily lives that for some, their absence would cease. But does it change the way our brain works?
Sometimes I take it and take it to another room away from me, sometimes I turn it off to reduce the time I spend on it or it continues to slow me down and waste my time but it prevents me from doing the work I need to do.
However, in a moment I find myself leaving where I was and I find myself doing something I can’t do – or can’t do as well as I want – without using it. For example, if I come across a word that I don’t know or don’t understand well, sometimes I run away and look it up in the library or ask ‘grandfather’ on Google.
Dad too!!! I want to pay for something either at a boutique or in a restaurant, by phone. Even if they don’t use Airtel Money or Mobile Money, when I call an ‘agent’ of one of these companies they charge me.
I’m planning to meet a friend soon for a drink, it’s on the phone. I want to go out with a girl to talk about the relationship between a man and a woman for the next few years, I can’t make an appointment anywhere but on the phone. I want to know the information of my family members who live far away from where I live now, there is no other way than using the phone.
To know the weather forecast, if it’s going to rain in my area, to know if I should bring a winter ball or a rain jacket, the phone tells me. When I think of something to add to the poem I composed, or maybe even the idea of a story in my head, there is no place to put it but on the phone.
Taking a photo or video of a new event on the street, listening to the news, knowing the new road I’m on if I add my destination, gathering or stealing numbers quickly, oh and turning on the flashlight when it’s too dark in the house, even buying electricity when I’m gone, it’s the phone, telephone, telephone.
A recent study found that adults in the United States look at their phones at least 344 times on average – at least once every four minutes – and spend three hours a day on these devices in total.
So the problem for many of us is that something that has become an urgent task [many of us are not paid] is to go to see what’s new on social media or to check our e-mails, which makes us endlessly scroll up and down on our phones and find the hours hidden in it. .
It’s a vicious cycle. As phones become more useful to us, we will use them more and more. The more we use it, the more we train the ways of our brain that guide us and tell us to pick up our phone to use it for every task we are asked to do at that time even if we don’t have it – and we also feel the urge and desire to look at our phones even when we don’t need to. .
In addition to being important in a world that has become a village due to the Internet and being on social media that has become like a religion in itself and technology that changes beauty or exaggerates it, how else does our dependence on these phones affect our brains? Is it all bad for us, or is there some good we should be thankful for?
As you’d expect, as we increasingly rely on our extended family relationships over the phone, which continues to grow year after year, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to keep up with the pace of this problem.
What we now know is that dropping what we were doing to look at the phone or look at the notification [notification] that we heard on the phone can have a negative effect on us. There is no surprise in that; we know that, in general, the habit of doing more than one thing at a time (multitasking) weakens or slows down our memory and our brain’s ability to work. It is with a Rwandan that he coined the proverb “Two jobs defeated the wolf.”
In a recent study, volunteers were shown a phone ‘screen’ with numbers on them that they had to move to one side or the other. The higher the number on the wheel, the more the volunteer had to be paid if he moved it to the right side.
In one part of the test, the participants of the study were allowed to write, on the ‘screen’, which wheel and which side they should go into. While the other half had to memorize these numbers using their brains without using their phones.
Unexpectedly, being able to use technology reminders helped them pass the tests even more. More surprising? When they used these technological reminders, they found that they remembered very well the circles that contained large numbers and found that they did not write because they had small numbers that they remembered well.
